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Comment My first Windows machine (Score 1) 387

I did an internship at a telecom research facility around that time. They provided me with a 286 outfitted to run electronics simulations software. It had 2 MB RAM installed on an ISA card (or a predecessor thereof, it's a long time ago). It ran Windows 3.0, sort of. 2 MB was too little, and the thing crashed constantly. Combine that with the clumsy UI (File Manager and Program Manager, for instance) and the mess of applications that hadn't standardized yet (every program used different shortcuts), and the experience was less than stellar.
The contrast with my own Macintosh was huge. If you think us Maccies are smug now, you should have seen us then.

Comment Re:Tolls? (Score 1) 837

I was in favor of replacing the current Dutch car taxing scheme with a PAYG scheme. At the moment I'm paying a tax ("ownership tax") with rates based on vehicle weight and fuel type. This is a fixed cost; I have to pay this even when my vehicle isn't driven for weeks at a time. This removes some of the financial incentive of not using the car.
A PAYG scheme more closely couples my cost to the actual cost society incurs by my road usage, esp. when you include congestion charging.
Congestion charging also gives me leverage. If my employer requires me to be at $congestion_prone_location at $congestion_peak_time I can hand him a bill. Employers don't care how much time their employees spend in traffic jams, maybe the financial consequences of those traffic jams will get their attention.

Comment Re:Tolls? (Score 5, Interesting) 837

Depends on how you implement it. A PAYG tax scheme was discussed in the Netherlands a few years ago, tariffs would have depended on the environmental rating of your vehicle, i.e. an old diesel would be taxed more than a new Euro-5 compliant one.

Over here the big advantages of PAYG were seen as:
- congestion pricing becomes possible
- it'd replace taxes on ownership and car purchase with usage-related pricing, incentivizing people to drive less.

The big disadvantage was the privacy concerns.

Books

Book Review: The Terrorists of Iraq 270

benrothke writes: The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting random typewriter keys for an infinite amount of time will eventually be able to create the complete works of Shakespeare. Various scientists such as Nobel laureate Arno Penzias have shown how the theorem is mathematically impossible. Using that metaphor, if you took every member of United States Congress and House of Representatives and wrote their collected wisdom on Iraq, it's unlikely they could equal the astuteness of even a single chapter of author Malcolm W. Nance in The Terrorists of Iraq: Inside the Strategy and Tactics of the Iraq Insurgency 2003-2014. It's Nance's overwhelming real-world experiential knowledge of the subject, language, culture, tribal affiliations and more which make this the overwhelming definitive book on the subject. Read below for the rest of Ben's review.

Comment Re:satellites (Score 1) 403

Most of the US Navy's nuclear ships are setup to be refueled at least once in the expected lifetime

Yes, that's why I specifically referred to CVN 78 which no longer has that requirement. The latest nuclear submarines have also been designed to do away with the midlife refueling, since that's a horrendously expensive 2-year-long drydock job.

Comment Re:satellites (Score 3, Informative) 403

The Voyager RTGs are decaying, NASA expects output power to drop below the point where it can keep a single instrument going around 2025.
The Pioneers are already long past the point where they can't send a strong enough signal to be detected.
The latest nuclear power plants for the US Navy have been designed to run without refueling for the life of the ship. That's 50 years for aircraft carriers, so the USS Gerald R Ford (CVN 78) is capable of functioning until 2065. Now I don't know how stable a nuclear power plant is when left on its own, but potentially this'll live much longer than the Voyagers.

ISS

ISS Crew Stuck In Orbit While Russia Assesses Rocket 105

astroengine sends word that the astronauts aboard the International Space Station will be staying up there longer than expected while engineers for Russia's space program try to figure out if it's safe to launch more rockets. The recent Russian cargo mission that spun out of control and eventually fell back into the atmosphere sparked worries that a vessel sent to retrieve the astronauts wouldn't make it all the way to the ISS's orbit. Roscosmos and NASA said the next rocket launch will be postponed at least two months. Even though the Russian cargo ship failed to reach the ISS, they have plenty of food, water, and air to last them to the next scheduled supply run — a SpaceX launch in late June.

Comment Re:hey, y'all, watch this! (Score 1) 49

The LR weighed 210 kg on Earth, 35 kg on the Moon.

I don't think he's putting so much force on it he'd lift one wheel though: he's standing downhill from the vehicle and he's holding on to it above its CoG. He'd have to be pulling the vehicle to lift that wheel, but he should be pushing it to prevent it sliding down the hillside.
More likely the rover is sitting on uneven ground and the right front suspension has bottomed out.

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